Now from the ALA’s Office of Information Technology Policy comes an active, free and useful forum for any librarian who’s had copyright concerns and no one to talk to.

The Copyright Advisory Network is an open bulletin board for copyright questions, with a community of “librarians, copyright scholars, and policy wonks” standing by to offer their expert (but not legal) advice. The purpose of this site is to encourage librarians to discuss copyright concerns, and seek feedback and advice from fellow librarians and copyright specialists. Communication and discussion are encouraged, and you can even ask questions anonymously.

As a part-time digital project manager, I cannot tell you how helpful it is to have a forum like this available to ask stupid questions. It’s all thanks to Freya Anderson’s copyright presentation at Internet Librarian 2008.

PS: there’s also a great digital slider from the OITP to quickly determine copyright.

The sun is setting on the Internet Librarian 2008 conference, but I’ll be back next week with more highlights and reflections from this most excellent learning experience. In the meantime, you can view many sessions from the conference on the Slideshare IL2008 group, or search Twitter or Flickr for conversations or photos (try using the IL2008 tag).

Steps in developing a social media plan
1. Listen

• Is there a conversation going on about your library right now? What’s being said? What’s the tone? Do you have an active or passive dialogue?

2. Prepare

• Define a strategy & concrete goals (i.e.: “increase awareness of library services”, “expose collection ‘gems’ to a wider audience”, “decrease the number of calls to tech help desk”)
• Pick a particular platform (or 2) – depends on your goals/strategy
• Check out this slideshare presentation on choosing and using social media platforms

3. Engage

• Start blogging, respond to posts, leave comments on other blogs, build your Facebook community, set up your wiki, etc. (PS: this is the fun part)

4. Meaure

• Are we getting anything out of this? What’s the return on investment (ROI)? In a Prospero social media survey of large corporations, 41% don’t really know how to measure that ROI other than by engagement.
• However, unless you have a stats-genius like Melissa Rethlefsen on your staff, traditional online metrics are not exactly easy
• Social Media measurement needs a combination of quantitative & qualitative measurement

Approaches to Measurement

“Stars, scars or neutral?” –the experience metric – take these & produce a number “of the 15 comments we’ve r’cvd, x were posititive, x were negative, x were neutral

Monitor general search engine results - Google is good at integrating Social Media objects into search results

Things to get started

• • Monitor social media search engine results
    • Why? It’s used by high value, highly connected, highly influential users
  • Blogs: Register w/ technorati & get metrics
  • • Authority score (# blogs linking to your blog, favorites (fans) & blogs rank (qualitative)
  • Del.icio.us has built in stats – how many people bookmarked your library (quantitative)? any comments? (qualitative)
  • Twitter – do you show up? how often?
  • Google alerts – set up your library’s name (in quotes) i.e.: “Univ of Pittsburg” library, then choose ‘comprehensive’ to get results from news, blogs, web video & groups, can be notified ‘as it happens’, daily or weekly
• analytics
  • Google analytics & Clicky
    • both create “conversion funnel” to measure a social media action chain
    • clicky ‘dashboard’ – measures referrers to your site from SM sources
    • Assess nature/sentiment of activity
    • what’s the strength & tone?

From choosing color palettes and designing 404 pages to a tool that simulates eye-tracking studies and something called FileHamster, this presentation runs the gamut from usability to security to just plain fun.

Credibility

• Update your copyright notice and add ‘last updated’ dates to your page.
• Consider adding posed photos to your contacts page. Users trust a face more than an email.

Content and Navigation

• Do you have important content in the ‘blindness zone’? That’s the very upper and lower part of your page, where banner ads might usually appear on commercial sites. Users generally ignore these areas, so you may want to relocate important content in those areas.
• Get rid of the ‘click here’ message next to a link. It destroys the flow of your site.
• Add the label tag to your forms. This make your site more accessible and user friendly.

Design

• “Web 2.0″-ify your logo. Small san-serif type, cheerful colors and rounded edges permeate Logo 2.0. The Web 2.0 stylr makes it simple to generate something new from an existing logo.
• Be an icon Icon. Wikimedia Commons and Smashing Magazine both offer free, professional looking icons.

Performance

• Check your page load times. Most webpage editing software should already offer this info, but if you wonder how it works in a browser you might not be using there are several sites that can check this. Firebug and Yslow are 2 FireFox browser add-ons that do this.
• Websiteoptimization.com offers a free service that calculates page size, composition, and download time and offers advice on how to improve page load time.
• Clean up your code. HTML Tidy is a computer program and a library the purpose of which is to fix invalid HTML and give the source code a reasonable layout, while cleanCSS.com can give your cascading style sheets a spring cleaning.
• Add a directory slash to the end of your urls. This ensures the web browser doesn’t have confusion over which file it’s looking for in your directory, which speeds up load time.

Search Engine Optimization

• Check your page titles and make sure their relevant to the page content. A good format for the <head> element is Document title | Section name | Library/site name

Social Media Optimization

• Add reciprocity to your pages with social bookmark links. The tiny icons you see on many sites let you post your site’s content to a variety of social media sites, and can be added to your page quite easily. This social bookmark generator is one way to generate the code.
• Consider microformats. Microformats are a semantic technology that take chunks of info and make it both human and machine readable, allowing things like contact information, appointments and events to move easily from your site to a calendar or address book. Firefox is really the only browser supporting this right now, but other browsers will probably follow this soon.
• Query your audience. Wisniewski suggested a simple 3 question survey to put on your site to elicit feedback from your users.
  • What is the purpose of your visit?
  • Did you complete the task you wanted to accomplish today?
  • If not, why not?

More “sense making” search engines you may have not yet heard about…
Searchme.com: Searchme is a visual search with a very clean layout. It clusters results by topic, then uses a slider to scroll through search results, which are displayed as an image of the actual webpage (similar to what you see when browsing albums on an iPod).
Powerset.com: Currently for wikipedia only, this engine does a linguistic analysis of your search term to give quick, key facts about the subject.
Searchcrystal.com and Carrot2.org: 2 metasearch engines good for determining ‘where to go next’. Both let you compare various search engine in one place. Carrot2 lets you choose the clustering algorithm for search results, allowing you to see relevant results in different ways. (Click on ‘Show options’ next to the search box to view.)
Bonus! Carrot2 has a tab for PubMed results.
Silobreaker.com: this is a news search that also includes a map of news hotspots, trends search, updated fact sheets and related ‘entities’ (like concept tag clouds).
Searchcloud.net: uses an interesting ‘cloud’ method to build a search: the larger you make the text of your search term, the more weight it is given in the search.
Loki.com: Privacy advocates may want to skip this one. This search engine uses your IP address to determine where you are, then retrieves search results based on your location. Great to find local search results, terrible if you’re hiding from the Feds.
Serph.com: a Web2.0 metasearch, this queries popular sites like flickr, digg, etc. results are capped at 400 results. For some reason I couldn’t get this to work on my version of FireFox.
Twing.com: data-mines discussion boards, great for totally esoteric topics that may be difficult to locate on the larger web
Spokeo.com: MEB was calling this “creepyo” because aggregates search results from social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook and LinkedIn. In fact, it lists up to 41 social sites you can mine for personal information. Log-in is required to search. This is a great search engine to prove to people that anything you post on the web is public and can be found by anyone, or to simply spy on the person in the cubicle next to you by entering their email.

This is what happens at conferences: between old friends, seldom-seen colleagues and serendipitous networking, 5 librarians from the South Central Chapter managed to rally 13 people for an impromptu dinner last night. But it wouldn’t be a true networking event without a relational flowchart.

Or dessert.

Dinner napkin illustration courtesy of Julie Gaines at Univ. of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Full stomach courtesy of Rosine’s Monterey. 

Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, professor at Stanford University and shoe artist (see photo) opened IL2008 with his keynote lecture “Communities & Communications in a Social and Mobile World”.

Historically, literate populations were able to do things together through the mediums available to them at the time. Think of the invention of the printing press: Martin Luther was not the first priest to oppose the Church, but he was the first to do so with the aid of printed broadsides to distribute his 95 Theses. Similarly, the rise of the internet, SMS text messaging and other new media provide new tools for organizing social movements in the modern world, to both good and bad ends. How can we harness the power of participatory media? The answer may be media literacy: not the tools like blogs, rss, photo/music/video sharing, social bookmarking etc, but also the ways in which people are using them.

How do you find the answer if you can’t pose it correctly? And once you find the answers, how can you determine if the answers are true? Certainly information literacy is key to answering those questions, but we also need to address how to use new media platforms. As Rheingold observed, if you want to keep up, “don’t keep up with the technologies, keep up with the literacies.”

To this end, check out these links for more information on media literacy and educational efforts concerning it.

Participatory Media Literacy: http://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy/index.cgi
Learn about the characteristics of participatory media literacy

Social Media Classroom: http://socialmediaclassroom.com/
A growing public resource of knowledge and relationships among all who are interested in the use of social media in learning. Includes a content management system (running on the open source CMS Drupal) which provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes, as well as a basic set of curricular materials to get started.

coming later, lots of free, useful tools from the first day of Internet Librarian, and a close up Howard Rheingold’s shoes.

It was also the subject of a workshop at IL 2008. AJAX is short for ‘asynchronous Javascript and XML’. Basically, it’s a way for a web page client to communicate directly with a web server without reloading the page, using the magic of the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object. For a more detailed overview, check out this tutorial from W3 school.

2. This blog is using it right now.

Ajax has many potential uses, from error checking and auto-suggest features on forms to pre-loading content and drag and drop functionality you see on sites like Google Maps Street View. One of the things I learned is that WordPress (the software that provides this blog to the public) uses it to provide some features on their platform. Ajax is also a way to explain the new features you see when databases redesign. EbscoHost, Ovid and Scopus all have a the feature where you can click a link to ‘view abstract’ and immediately the content is revealed, without ever having to reload or go to another page. Ajax is one of the methods that allows web pages to do this.

3. It can help you provide a more dynamic library website.

Ajax has many library applications. It can offer a way to browse subject headings by suggesting likely terms, or alert users to potential number of search results, as Virginia Tech did with “Guesstimate” in their library catalog. It can serve as a substitute for long drop down menus, or keep pages clean by offering a search box only when users click on a link (click on ‘Site Search’ on this page from Montana State University Libraries for an example). You can even use Ajax to write your own federated search engine, as Curtain University Library in Australia has done. Of course, writing your own federated search engine comes with it’s own unique challenges, especially when it comes to authenticating users, which if you’re wondering, can in some cases be done using API keys from vendors.

4. You don’t need a Computer Science degree to use it, but it helps.

One of the things I realized during this class was how much more I needed to learn about xml, css, php, sql, and various other programming-related acronyms in order to implement anything scripted in Ajax on my library site. The workshop instructors (Karen Coombs and Jason Clark), in addition to being highly informative and engaging teachers, were also both self taught, and one the best pieces of advice they gave was to read up on the documentation and just keep practicing and writing pages until they work. One of the other librarians in the workshop wondered about the challenge this offers to those who do not have time to learn a new scripting language on top of their other responsibilities. Karen Coombs had an astute observation in this respect: that it is good for Public Services folks to at least see what is going on behind the scenes on library site design. In gaining an understanding of what the tech people have to do to make something work, you start to understand that it is not all just that easy.

5. Medical Librarians are EVERYWHERE.

Well, this one is not really about Ajax, but I have to point out that out of about 17 people in the CE, 4 of us were from medical libraries. And just next door, Sadie Honey was teaching a class on project management. We’re certainly pervasive, aren’t we?

Suggested resources

The workshop’s slide presentation - Ajax for Libraries
Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications brief overview by Jesse James Garret
Getting Started with Ajax from Alistapart.com
Google AJAX libraries API
Foundations of Ajax by R. Asleson & N. Schutta (ISBN 1590595823)